Wednesday, December 28, 2016

“Fake it till you make it”: The Dark Side of Bro Culture In Silicon Valley

Since around the turn of the century I've been trying to decide if the emphasis should be on the 'Sili' or the 'con' in Silicon Valley.

And, as I've mentioned elsewhere you can pretty much draw a straight line from Nietzsche's "There are no truths, only interpretations" through Derrida and the deconstructionists to the normalization of making shit up by postmodernist folks in the social sciences to today.

From Fortune:

The Ugly Unethical Underside of Silicon Valley

As the list of startup scandals grows, it’s time to ask whether entrepreneurs are taking “fake it till you make it” too far.

Vinod Khosla did not show up at TechCrunch Disrupt to be harangued by
some smartass, know-nothing journalist. The venture capitalist came to
talk about disruption and revolutions to an audience of 1,000 potential
disrupters and revolutionaries, laptop glow illuminating their faces in a
San Francisco warehouse.

But of course the journalist had to bring up Hampton Creek,
the vegan-food company that had fashioned itself—and more important,
valued itself—like a tech company. Khosla, a legend in Silicon Valley,
was a Hampton Creek investor, alongside Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and SalesforceCRM-0.44%
CEO Marc Benioff. Despite media reports of shoddy science at the company on things like shelf-life testing, and an FDA battle over misleading labeling, Khosla declared Hampton Creek was “doing awesome.”

“Debatable,” the journalist, TechCrunch’s Jonathan Shieber, needled before beginning his next question.

Khosla cut him off with a “talk to the hand” motion and turned to the audience with a wide, this guy amirite?
grin. “Here’s a journalist,” he said, “who doesn’t know what’s going
on, has an opinion, just like he does, to make interesting stories.” He
turned back to Shieber: “I know a lot more about how they’re doing,
excuse me, than you do.”

This was in September 2015. And what Khosla didn’t know was that
Hampton Creek’s employees and contractors had been covertly buying its
jars of eggless mayo from grocery stores for more than a year, allegedly
as a way to make the product appear more popular to its retail
partners. It would be another year before Bloomberg Businessweek
revealed the scheme, in an article featuring an animated GIF of founder
Josh Tetrick’s face covered in squirts of mayonnaise. (Hampton Creek
has denied wrongdoing, describing the buybacks as quality-control
testing. Khosla declined to comment.)

The startup community has a set response to this kind of news, and it
sounds a lot like Khosla’s sniping. Blindly defend; it’s us against
them. After the Wall Street Journal first exposed problems at blood-testing startup Theranos
in 2015, for example, venture investors like Greylock’s Josh Elman and Y
Combinator’s Sam Altman tweeted defenses against the one-sided “slam
piece.”

But as scandals have piled up—and other negative stories have proved
to be true—the defensive strategy hasn’t aged well. While some investors
are standing by their tainted companies, others are taking pains to
distance the bad actors from the rest of the startup pack. Theranos,
which has since voided two years of its test results and faces a
criminal investigation, is now described as an exception. Just one bad
apple. (“Theranos doesn’t represent us, we are better,” a group of
startup founders sang in the annual holiday video created by VC firm
First Round Capital.) Likewise Zenefits, the human resources startup
that admitted its employees had cheated on mandatory compliance
training: a freak occurrence. #NotAllStartups.

Lending Club’s loan doctoring? That’s not what startups are
about. Same for WrkRiot, the startup that abruptly shut down after an
employee accused it of forging wire-transfer documents. Or Skully, the
failed maker of smart motorcycle helmets, being sued for “fraudulent
bookkeeping.” Or ScoreBig, the struggling ticketing site being sued by
brokers. Or Rothenberg Ventures, the firm under investigation after
using investors’ money to finance founder Mike Rothenberg’s side
startup. (The firm says it informed investors.) Or Faraday Future and
Hyperloop One, ambitious, well-funded companies now tainted by lawsuits
and accusations of, respectively, overhype and of mismanagement.
(Faraday has not commented on its suits; Hyperloop denies the accusation
and had settled its suit.) Or any of the dozens of smaller shady
accounting shortcuts, growth hacks gone awry, and other implosions too
minor to make headlines....MUCH MORE